Rick And Morty Portal effect in Adobe After Effects (Tutorial)

Published on May 7, 2021

Adobe After Effects Tutorials

portal, rick and morty

Rick And Morty Season 5

Rick and Morty are probably no strangers to you. Their interdimensional adventures are highly entertaining if you enjoy animated sitcoms. The most popular item from the show is definitely Rick’s portal gun. They use it in every single episode and is key to their adventures. So when Adult Swim announced that they would release season 5 on June 20 we had no choice but to recreate the portal effect.

Old effect

Portals are not new at all, they have been around for years in different movies and games. But they all look significantly different. We for example already made 2 different kind of portal effect in the past

Our very first tutorial was about the most famous portal of the game portal which is very basic. Here you only have a glowing fire like edge and in the middle you can see the other space.

The second one was about Dr. Strange’s portal. Yet again a very basic portal. Here you have an edge that has sparks flying around while it was spinning and on the inside you could see the other space.

However this time it is a bit more complicated because with Ricks portal we do actually have an inside to the portal. And also because our reference is a cartoon and not a real life image it get a little more difficult to choose the best looking “realistic” rick and Morty portal.

Whenever you are translating cartoons to real life which have specific looks you need to be creative. You cannot just 100% copy the effect and call it a day. You need to play around with it and go through a whole trail and error phase. This is also the reason a lot of these life action movies are bad because they don’t stick or go too far from the idea of the original animator.

Storyblocks

Big thanks to Storyblocks for their support. If you ever need stock footage for your video head over to them! Next to the 4K stock clips, they also have After Effects templates, Premiere Pro presets, overlay effects and so much more. Download unlimited video assets for a single price per year.